Overview

I am an experienced professional software developer, architect and manager.

Employment History

Architecture Manager

REA Group (Melbourne, VIC, Australia)
Feb 2017 - present

I am currently leading a team of developers, tech leads and
architects who are responsible for providing architectural leadership,
consulting and support to product delivery teams in REA Group
globally.

Responsibilities:

Leading the overall technical architecture strategy for REA Group
in collaboration with other senior technical leaders.

Using team resources, expertise and current industry insights to
shape the vision, goals, and measures of success for the
Architecture function within REA Group.

Acting as an evangelist for the role of Architecture within REA
Group, building support for the function and its team members among
internal Lines of Business.

Working with other functional leaders to understand current issues
and strategic opportunities as well as managing their expectations.

Working with the relevant architecture and tech lead forums to
ensure consistent and strategic architectural models are in place.

Building the architectural capability of delivery teams across REA
Group by identifying, developing, and mentoring architectural
talent in all teams globally.

Coaching, mentoring and supervising the Global Architecture team to
ensure they have the skills, knowledge and support to perform in
their role whilst recognising their potential.

Key achievements:

Redefined the engagement model for the Group Architecture team, in
consultation with stakeholders across the business including Tech
Leads, Engineering Managers, Product Managers and the Chief
Engineer.

Implemented planning and governance processes to improve the
effectiveness of the team’s engagements with line of business
teams.

Drove the establishment of a “global architecture forum” comprised
of technical leaders from across REA’s global businesses.

Led the Tech Lead Guild, the internal “community of practice” and
focus of profressional development for REA’s technical leadership.

Throughout my time at REA I have also initiated, driven and been
responsible for a number of “extra curricular” activities including:

Editing and curating the public REA engineering blog
(http://rea.tech/).

Mentoring and coaching grads and junior developers.

Facilitating a cross-disciplinary group focussed on REA’s tech
community outreach programmes.

Promoting and supporting the community of internal “guilds” of
practice.

Contributing to the IT Grad Programme steering committee.

Senior Tech Lead

REA Group (Melbourne, VIC, Australia)
Jan 2016 - Jan 2017

Responsibilities:

Leading the overall technical direction for REA in collaboration
with other senior technical leaders.

Providing technical direction to my team.

Working with stakeholders to design high quality solutions that
meet the needs of our users.

Leading the implementation of architecturally complex projects of
global significance.

Contributing to the REA knowledge base through blog posts,
brown-bags sessions and coaching less experienced members of the
team.

Tech Lead

REA Group (Melbourne, VIC, Australia)
Dec 2012 - Dec 2015

The consumer-facing web application that powers realestate.com.au is
backed by provisioning, messaging and search systems that have evolved
over several years. I lead a small team of engineers with
responsibility for the long-term architectural direction of these
systems, and for undertaking project work in cooperation with
line-of-business teams to implement technical improvements.

In addition to product delivery projects, I managed and maintained
some key internal infrastructure products including Atlassian Bamboo
and GitHub Enterprise, including vendor relationships and contract
negotiation.

Responsibilities:

Contributing to the overall technical direction for REA in
collaboration with other senior technical leaders.

Providing technical direction to my teams.

Working with stakeholders to design high quality solutions that
meet the needs of our users.

Senior Developer

I was employed as a senior developer on REA’s mobile team,
responsible for development and maintenance of REA’s iPhone and iPad
applications.

Consultant

Cogent Consulting (Melbourne, VIC, Australia)
April 2009 - Jan 2011

I am an experienced consultant, developer and team leader with expertise in
many development environments and platforms. As well as cutting code,
I am skilled at configuring the systems and tools that support the
development process.

I’ve worked on numerous projects for Cogent’s customers, including
significant public Ruby on Rails and Java-based applications.

Projects:

REA Group - I helped REA Group implement continuous delivery to
streamline their software development and release processes.
Starting from a chaotic and largely manual release process, I was
part of a small team developed tools and recipes to use Chef to
deploy REA’s applications to a “virtual private cloud” in Amazon’s
EC2, enabling development teams to more effective deploy and test
core applications.

Lonely Planet - Over a period of 18 months I helped Lonely Planet
deliver a number of key improvements to their web site, including
“Contact Us”, private messaging and their re-launched online shop.
Significant technical components of this work included:

Integration with Facebook

Integration with Zendesk

Migration of legacy customer support data

Delivery of a digital fulfillment service

Majitek - I spent six months in 2009 working with Majitek on their
connected real estate management product. I contributed to feature
development in many parts of the Spring and Hibernate-based system,
and also undertook a major effort to “skin” the UI of the
application to allow Majitek to customise its look and feel for
their customers.

In between customer engagements, I also spent some time working on
Cogent’s Getting Things Done® product, Runway.

Senior Developer

I was engaged with Lonely Planet to join the major redevelopment of
their public web site. In the course of the contract I worked on many
components of the site, including the Drupal-based content management
system and Java web applications.

I also acted as a technical team leader for much of the contract,
being responsible for the day to day management and technical output
of five developers.

Senior Developer

I was contracted to CGU Insurance (part of IAG) to work on a new
programme of work to develop a framework and end user applications
that provide a modern user interface to legacy policy management
systems.

The initial project used J2EE application servers and a 3270
screen scraping tool to deliver a browser-based end user application
based on data managed by a legacy mainframe system.

Projects:

Design and development of a J2EE application that provides a
browser-based front end to a legacy 3270 insurance policy management
system.

Development and configuration of an integrated continuous build
environment based on Ant and Pulse that allowed new developers on
the project to quickly become productive, including comprehensive
unit testing, coverage reports and static analysis.

Technical Analyst

My role in the Solution Architecture group at Australia Post involved
performing technical quality assurance for projects developed by
Post’s external service providers. This included document, design and
code reviews, as well as general support and coordination of
development, test and production environments.

I engaged with external lead designers and developers and internal
technical teams to provide specialist guidance, ensuring applications
are designed, developed, tested, and deployed properly and in
accordance with enterprise standards.

Projects:

Compile a design and coding standards document for use by all Java
and J2EE development teams working on Post projects.

Development of a WebLogic authentication module for OpenLDAP. This
module extended the BEA-provided OpenLDAP authenticator to allow
editing of user and group properties.

Senior Developer

I was contracted to Sensis Pty Ltd to work on an enterprise-wide
integrated content management system. The work involved custom J2EE
application development and integration using Tibco and Sun
components.

Key challenges in this project included development of components for
high performance XML data manipulation, and concurrent scheduling of
inter-dependent work units.

I was engaged on various components of the system over the life of the
project, including:

Projects:

New design and development of a subsystem to convert legacy data in
real time. This component handles thousands of JMS messages an hour
and performs updates to the central content server, maintaining
order and transactional consistency.

Development of additional functionality for the core server
component including a subsystem to publish content to downstream
legacy applications.

Troubleshooting and resolving bugs in the end-user GUI application.

Senior Consultant

I held the position of senior consultant in the Technology Integration
Services practice of BearingPoint, Inc. I was responsible for and
involved in a wide range of consulting assignments covering design and
implementation of complex information technology systems.

Projects:

Establish an EAI infrastructure and initial integration processes
for a state government department using Tibco BusinessWorks 5.0 and
Tibco Enterprise for JMS.

Design and develop enhancements to an EAI adapter between a Tibco
Integration Manager application and a legacy provisioning system.

Trouble-shoot and develop enhancements to a proprietary server
process that extends Tibco InConcert.

Maintain and trouble-shoot the data architecture for a large
enterprise middleware application, including updates to the physical
data model.

Design and develop a Java testing framework for enterprise
middleware applications, including IBM MQ Series and Tibco
Rendezvous, MessageBroker and Integration Manager components.

Design and develop a test log analysis toolkit in Perl to measure
and report on the results of middleware interface testing.

Senior IT Specialist (Solution Architect)

IBM Global Services (Atlanta, GA, USA)
November 1999 - December 2001

I was employed as a Solution Architect within IBM’s Center for E-Business Innovation, primarily
as part of the content management/e-publishing team.

My duties at IBM included: designing and developing web-based
(Internet and intranet) publishing, content management and portal
solutions for IBM’s customers; managing small to medium development
projects; providing leadership and mentoring to other members of the
development team; and architecting solutions with Domino/Lotus Notes,
IBM WebSphere, IBM DB2, IBM WebSphere CommerceSuite, Oracle, Open
Market, Vignette and Interwoven.

Projects:

In 2001, I planned, designed and implemented a content management
system based on Interwoven TeamSite, and integrated with WebSphere
CommerceSuite, for a major manufacturer of medical imaging
equipment. This on-going project involved requirements analysis and
macro design, micro design, implementation and deployment. My role
included pre-sales, technical design and lead development duties.

In 2000, I worked with the world’s premier financial market to
define requirements and project scope for web user registration and
personalisation system. For the same customer, I contributed to the
development of a prototype Java application for institutional
investors to track trading events and information.

Implementation of a Domino-based content management system for a
major Spanish-language television network. This included development
of complex Notes forms and views, Java agents, JavaScript libraries
and HTML. In 2000 IBM filed a patent application for my design of a
system to allow end-user control of site navigation via the Notes
application.

Consultant

PSR Software, Inc. (Atlanta, GA, USA)
March 1998 - November 1999

I was employed by PSR to perform pre-sales marketing and
demonstrations, post-sales implementation, project management,
installation, training and support for the software products that PSR
develops and distributes.

Other duties included developing Domino-based e-commerce web sites for
customers and performing ongoing Notes/Domino development and
maintenance tasks for internal and external customers.

Projects:

JustWin Technologies: JustWin is an Australian software vendor
that markets a Lotus Domino-based production support system for the
apparel industry. I was responsible for pre-sales activities such as
consulting and demonstrations, and post-sales infrastructure design,
implementation and training. Implementation of the JustWin system
included gathering requirements from the system’s users, and working
with the vendor to design and implement customisations as required.

Visual Impact: PSR markets a Domino-based web query tool for
relational databases, called Visual Impact. As well as providing
implementation and user support, I spent several months updating and
enhancing the product to streamline the user interface, utilise new
features provided by Domino R5, and ensure Year 2000 readiness.

Write “cookbooks” on use of the DB2 LSX to access DB2 data from
Notes and Domino applications.

Projects:

While at Software Spectrum, I planned for and designed an enterprise
Lotus Notes email infrastructure for a large department of the
Victorian State Government. This included developing standards
documents and administration guides, overseeing the initial roll-out
of the environment, and providing administrator and user support. As
a result of the new infrastructure, the Department was able to
consolidate multiple disparate email programs and systems, integrate
with the rest of the Victorian Government’s Notes systems and take
advantage of Notes’ calendaring and scheduling capabilities.

In another project, I contributed as assistant project manager for a
project to implement Microsoft SMS for a major international
chemical company. This project involved working with the customer’s
project team to define application requirements and installation
procedures, then building and testing SMS installation scripts to
support these requirements.

Systems Engineer, Senior Systems Engineer

Business Computers of Australia (Melbourne, VIC, Australia)
May 1993 - February 1997

Design and implement Lotus Notes systems

Design and implement LANs (Novell Netware, OS/2 LAN Server, SCO Unix)

Design and implement LAN and WAN communication solutions

Plan and manage upgrades of operating system & application software

Pre-sales consulting in above areas

Problem resolution and technical support

Lotus Notes, LAN and systems support

2nd level support for other engineers

Maintenance and support of internal Lotus Notes systems

Professional Memberships

Association for Computing Machinery

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers

IEEE Computer Society

Education

Higher School Certificate, 1986
Banyule High School

About

Hi! My name is Michael Rowe and this is my web site.

Here I write about what ever is on my mind, which tends to be
related to running and programming computers, since that's what I do.